“So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?”

– Hunter S. Thompson

The following applies to coaching athletes as much as dealing with psychiatry patients…

Carl Jung on the Doctor/Patient relationship and methods in psychology:

 

Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from Experimental Psychology.

 

He would be better advised to put away his scholar’s gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart through the world. There, in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-hells, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges, Socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with real knowledge of the human soul.

 

It is enough to drive one to despair that in practical psychology there are no universally valid recipes and rules.

 

There are only individual cases with the most heterogeneous needs and demands – so heterogeneous that we can virtually never know in advance what course a given case will take, for which reason it is better for the doctor to abandon all preconceived opinions.

 

This does not mean that he should throw them overboard, but that in any given case he should use them merely as hypotheses for a possible explanation.

 

 

An ancient adept has said: “If the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way.”

 

This Chinese saying, unfortunately only too true, stands in sharp contrast to our belief in the “right” method, irrespective of the man who applies it.

 

In reality, everything depends on the man and little or nothing on the method.

 

 

If we have to deal with the human soul we can only meet it on its own ground, and we are bound to do so whenever we are confronted with the real and crushing problems of life.

 

 

We would do well to abandon from the start any attempt to apply ready-made solutions and warmed-up generalities of which the patient knows just as much as the doctor.

 

Long experience has taught me not to know anything in advance and not to know better, but to let the unconscious take precedence.

“The man who is only wise and only holy interests me about as much as the skeleton of a rare saurian, which would not move me to tears.

The insane contradiction, on the other hand, between existence beyond Maya in the cosmic Self, and that amiable human weakness which fruitfully sinks many roots into the black earth, repeating for all eternity the weaving and rending of the veil as the ageless melody of India—this contradiction fascinates me; for how else can one perceive the light without the shadow, hear the silence without the noise, attain wisdom without foolishness?”

-Carl Jung

Eye in the Wood

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This eye in the wood on the window sill,

Tells a long story,

Of growth, adventure & rest.

Now it looks out from its temporary spot.

Taking in the room, and everything outside of it.

So much has it seen,

So much will it see,

There’s wisdom in its pupil,

Can it even see me?

Resin covers its dark depths,

Are those tears?

For what it’s seen, what it sees,

And for who it longs for from the years.

It absorbs the raindrops on the window,

Absorbs its new tenants.

Has observed the passing of horses.

Of time.

It takes it all in.

Everything reduces to primary form in its blackness.

It recognises it all.

It knows it is that.

Waiting patiently to be reunited with itself.

The time will come.

It’s already happened and is happening still.

All ends in the eye in the wood on the window sill.

TF

Beware of Those that Offer Answers

Beware of those that offer answers.

There are two broad types you’ll meet,

The first are those that mean you well,

Others hide your ruin by deceit.

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We need to follow guidance,

But at some point you must,

Forget the outstretched hand, sincere or not,

And in your own intuition trust.

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Help isn’t always useful,

Recall the Hansel and Gretyl tale,

Those that promise to build you up,

Are sometimes reliant that you fail.

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So I don’t mean for you to turn down friends,

I just caution that you may,

Be lead to destruction down the line,

By the face who bore a smile that day.

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TF